member of:Observers of the Interdependence of Domestic Objects and Their Influence on Everyday Life

This group has been active for a long time and has already made some remarkable assertions which render life simpler from the practical point of view. For example, I move a pot of green color five centimeters to the right, I push in the thumbtack beside the comb and if Mr. A (another adherent like me) at this moment puts his volume about bee-keeping beside a pattern for cutting out vests, I am sure to meet on the sidewalk of the avenida Madero a woman who intrigues me and whose origin and address I never could have known...--Remedios Varo

(Artwork by Remedios Varo)

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.--Franz Kafka

Thursday, April 4, 2013

You truly stop to smell the roses
You notice the dew on the leaves
You can read from the bark on the trees
Nature’s little secrets open to play for you
Like the vintage musical boxes

Your step is light
Even if your coat looks heavy
You are different
Distant, attractive yet unattainable
Like a sailing ship at the horizon

Here, on the other side of the things
Where the dreams gather to rest
I met a Dream of You
Beautiful like the clef and the notes
Awaiting the One to make music with

notes from zoe:

So, I was caught by the light step despite the heavy coat, and the ship in the distance... and while I was thinking about composition, I found the stories of St. Zita and St. Vincent, whose are both honored at the Basilica of San Frediano in Lucca. St. Zita was a maid, and she was taking bread from the house of her wealthy employers to feed the poor. Someone told on her, and her employers confronted her, telling her to open her coat and show them what she was carrying. Disappointed and ashamed, she slowly opened her coat, and piles of daffodils fell out, but no bread. She is, like St. Fevronia, one who was able to overwhelm the violence of others by nothing more than their own radiance; as a result she went from a simple harassed maid to respected leader of the house despite several difficulties.

After St. Vincent was martyred, a flock of ravens protected his body from the vultures until others could come retrieve it and give it a proper burial, which they did at what is now called Cape St. Vincent, where the ravens continued their guard over his shrine to such a visible extent that Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi (1099-1165) gave the shrine its name Kanisah al-Ghurab (Church of the Raven). In this particular drawing, I didn’t focus on the birds being ravens because I wanted them to be smaller, but it is interesting to note that ravens have a special place in many traditions as mediators between life and death; in Sweden they can be considered the ghosts of murder victims, and in some areas of far-east Russia, Kutkh, a trickster, is a raven who creates himself from an old fur coat.

The pairing gave me a heavy coat which could disappear from both ends.

Investigate Your Dreams

Friends and Artists

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

"Everything leads me to think that, in the near future, reality will be considered exclusively as a mere state of depression and inactivity of the mind"--Salvador Dali